In the News

MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. — From a couch on the back deck of a dockside restaurant, the Beatles playing in the background and a breeze blowing off the water, Joe Cunningham gestured to Shem Creek.

"This could be the reality here, of oil rigs and oil spills off the beach," Mr. Cunningham said. "An oil spill could just decimate the area, and all of a sudden instead of people coming to Charleston, South Carolina, they high-tail it down to Florida or somewhere else."

Ripples from the shutdown of the federal government are starting to expand into Naperville.

This week Loaves & Fishes Community Services received its first requests for assistance from furloughed workers who've become unwitting pawns in a political struggle happening 600 miles away in Washington, D.C.

U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, D-Naperville, released a statement this week saying that he will donate his congressional pay earned during the government shutdown to the Northern Illinois Food Bank.

Foster did the same during the 2013 shutdown over repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Rep. Bill Foster, D-Naperville, signed on to a letter from fellow Congressional Democrats calling on Gov. Bruce Rauner to alleviate the tax burden on Illinois residents by mitigating the effects of the tax cut bill, which Republicans passed last year.

The specific provision in the bill that Foster and the nine other representatives were concerned about was the cap on deducting state and local taxes, known as the SALT deduction, to $10,000 a year.

Before being elected to Congress in 2008, Representative Bill Foster of Illinois, a Democrat, worked for more than 20 years as a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Now, as the only member of Congress with a Ph.D. in science, he says there is an urgent need for more scientists in politics.

CONGRESS IS FINALLY turning its attention to Silicon Valley. And it's not hard to understand why: Technology impinges upon every part of our civic sphere.

Democratic Illinois Reps. Jan Schakowsky, Mike Quigley and Bill Foster on Monday visited a migrant children's shelter in Schakowsky's district operated by the Heartland Alliance as the Trump administration grapples with reuniting children officials separated from parents at the U.S. – Mexico border.

The Trump White House is struggling with meeting a court-ordered deadline for identifying children separated from their families and bringing them to their parents.